How Schrodinger's Cat Escaped The Box

Misfits: The Mercury Years 1986-1990 is a new four-CD box set featuring eighties British pop band Curiosity Killed The Cat. Two and a half years in the making, this set has been compiled by SDE Editor Paul Sinclair and has been put together with the cooperation of the band. Curiosity Killed The Cat were fronted by the charismatic Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot and they enjoyed a number one album and a string of hits in the late 1980s, including Down To Earth, Ordinary Day, Name and Number and Misfit. The promo video for the latter was memorably filmed by – and co-starred – Andy Warhol, who took a shine to the band and invited them over to New York in 1986.

The sad fact about box sets is that there's always a fan out there who thinks they could have compiled a better one. An even sadder fact is that they're often correct, and the very notion of anthologizing Van Der Graaf Generator was a fraught one for that very reason. More, perhaps, than any other band of the early-'70s prog era, VDGG polarized their fans as much as the band's blatantly inhospitable sound outraged outsiders. They cut just eight studio albums, and all eight possess a wholly different character, all the more so since the band actually broke up midway through the sequence…